‘Utopian Topics’: Ruskin and Oxford

Abstract

2019 MARKS THE BICENTENARY of John Ruskin’s birth. I want to take this opportunity to reconsider his dealings with Oxford – what the university did for him, what he did for the university, what the connection tells us about Oxford, about nineteenth century education, and about education more generally. As it happens, Corpus Christi College, the college which generously hosts the F. W. Bateson Memorial Lecture, is the perfect place for a talk on this subject. It was Corpus Christi that provided Ruskin with a home during his years as the university’s first Slade Professor of Fine Art. He was grateful, and he developed real affection for the college. But Corpus Christi was not where the story begins. Christ Church, Corpus Christi’s grand neighbour, was the college that admitted him as an eccentric 18-year-old undergraduate, in 1837 – the year in which Victoria, born like Ruskin in 1819, became queen. He left Oxford for the last time in 1884, by then very much out of patience with the university. It was a long and often fractious relationship. Tensions between Ruskin’s aspirations and the objectives of the university ebbed and flowed through the decades, but they never disappeared. He was both insider and outsider. At times he seemed an irrelevance, even a joke. Now, however, his thinking about our shared responsibility for the environment, or the necessary connections between disciplines, or the need for students to take an active part in their education, or the importance of an outward-facing and ethically grounded approach to academic life, look less utopian, and more mainstream, than was once the case. So too does the way in which his work challenged the gendered identity of the university, and of its intellectual authority. Ruskin was among those who helped to build the Oxford that we know today, but he did so from a position of mingled allegiance and dissent.